Our Own Rodney Thing
HamdenRice
Manhattan and Brooklyn, May 1, 1992
“That music is a little sad for this kind of play, don’t you think?” Paul called out from the fourth row of the empty little theater to the cellist on stage in the spot light.
The cellist looked spent and exhausted, leaning over his instrument as though playing the long, somber adagio had been too much for him.
“This isn’t what you had in mind, is it?” Paul whispered to Daryl who was sitting next to him in the dark.
After a few moments, the cellist seemed to recover and gazed into the footlights. He was dressed all in black and on the black stage, in the spot light, his white hands and face seemed to be floating, a disembodied spirit hovering above the dark brown cello.
“It was just an idea,” the cellist said, “I just thought I’d run this by you guys as a possible interlude between act two and act three.”
“I love it,” Daryl said, “it was very beautiful, and I was very moved by it, but it doesn’t fit anywhere in this. By all means keep working on it, maybe for the next show – if there ever is a next show. But what you were playing last time – something more Noel Pointer-ish – that’s what’s going to fit in right here.”
“Yeah, I figured,” the cellist said, packing away the instrument in the black case at his feet, “it’s just something that came to me watching the riots last night. I was fiddling while watching TV last night, and they were playing that clip of the truck driver guy getting bashed in the head with that brick, over and over, and while I was watching, I was fooling around with some minor chords, and, well this just finally came to me – an improvisation, I guess. I guess I just channeled it.”
“Hey, by all means keep working on it. It’s very beautiful,” Paul said.
“Where’s Annie?” Daryl whispered in the dark to Paul, “We can’t do much more today without her.”
“I know, I know,” Paul said. He tried to think up an excuse for Annie, but he only drew blanks.
“I mean, it’s like, her vehicle, you know?” Daryl said.
“I’ll have another talk with her tonight when I get home.”
“You’re not pissed off at me for mentioning it again, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“You know I love her, right?”
“I know that bro’. You don’t have to say that.”
“You know I adore her, right?”
“I know. I know.”
“You know I think she’s the only human being on the planet who can carry this show, right?”
“I know, I know,” Paul said, “I’ll call her. This can’t go on like this. This can’t happen anymore.”
“Give her my love, home-peas. Be gentle, OK? You know I adore her, right? Always have, almost as much as you do, homey. You know that, right?”
“I know, I know.”
Paul went backstage to one of the empty dressing rooms where there was a rare telephone in the theater that wasn’t disconnected or broken and called home.
Right after answering curtly, just who?, Annie said, “You need to come home right now.”
“What about – wouldn’t it be nice if this had gone,” Paul said, “ ‘Hi baby, how are you?’ ‘ I’m fine? And how are you?’ ‘ I’m fine too! How was your day?’ ‘ My day was fine!’ ‘How’s the weather in Manhattan?’ ‘Gorgeous!’ ‘About the cellist’s audition and rehearsal, I didn’t come in today because’– because, because ...”
“You need to get out of Manhattan and come home right now! I’m not kidding.”
“‘Hi Honey! It’s gorgeous in Brooklyn too! I didn’t come into rehearsal and I embarrassed you in front of Daryl, the cellist, and the theater manager because – ?’”
“You need to get your head out of theater fantasy-land, right now. You need to get on the damned train and get home right now!”
“You were supposed to listen to the cellist audition a piece for the show and you were supposed to do a read through of the part of act two that I gave you – let’s see – like a week ago?”
“I decided to stay home and memorize lines for a few hours. Then, when I went to the Park Slope Diner for a late breakfast, everyone was talking about all this shit that’s happening, so of course I couldn’t come into the city, but you – you – need to come home right now. And when you get here – you need to do something about the fucking neighbor across the hall who’s trying to drive me crazy.”
“All what shit happening?”
“Are you that out of it? The riots. They’re here now. They’re all over the city, especially in the Village, right near the theater. You need to get your head out of fuzzy cloud theater land and get home right now.”
“I don’t hear any riots, and we’ve got the front exits open.”
“They’re all over the Village! What’s wrong with you? Can’t you hear them? You need to get out of the city before they shut down the subways. They’re already rampaging through the stores in downtown Brooklyn, so you need to get here without taking the IRT. You have to take the A or the C.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t any riots over here.”
“Well, maybe they’re not in the West Village. They say they’re around Thompkins Square Park, and there’s supposed to be a big demonstration near City Hall. They say they’ve torched Penn Station – or maybe it was Grand Central – and they’re looting and burning the big departments stores, like A&S and Bloomingdales. And people right here in the building are freaking the fuck out – especially that white boy across the hall is seriously freaking out, and he’s driving me the fuck crazy. Please come home now, please?”
“Brandon?” There were only two apartments on their floor of the brownstone apartment building and only one white tenant in the building, so he knew she must be talking about Brandon. “What’s he even doing home?”
“Everyone is coming home to get out of the city before the riots.”
When Paul came back to the orchestra seats, the house lights had been turned all the way on. Daryl was already gathering his script, sheet music and papers into his black leather knap sack. The part time day theater manager stared at them from the center aisle with a worried look on his face.
“Sorry guys,” the theater manager said, “management called to say I have to close up early today because of the riots. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s OK,” Paul said, “better safe than sorry. I guess Annie didn’t flake out on us after all.”
“I have to go anyway,” Daryl said. “I called the apartment and Charles says the bank sent him home early too, and now he’s sitting at home in a panic. I’m going to have to go home and hold his hand in my lap and tell him,” and Daryl took on the voice of a kindergarten teacher, “now Charles, honey, there’s nothing to worry about, everything is going to be OK. Harlem is not as scary and dangerous as you think it is. It’s no scarier than Dorchester, just bigger.”
“Annie says people in Brooklyn are talking about the riots also. She’s freaking out too, but you know, she’s been freaking out since this whole thing in LA started. Come to think of it, she’s been freaking out about it since before it even started, for like a week.”
“I have to convince Charles that the ghetto youts aren’t going to storm Convent Avenue.”
“You mean yuf. Da youts live in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach,” Paul said. “Harlem has yufs.”
“Yeah,” Daryl said, “Harlem has da yufs and Brooklyn’s got da yuf.”
“No, homey, apparently Brooklyn got da feral yuf.”
“Be safe, buddy,” Daryl said, “home-safe, OK?”
#
Paul walked up MacDougal Street to Washington Square Park. He didn’t see the riots. Everything looked normal at the park, and the chess players at the corner of MacDougal and Washington Square South were slamming their pieces and slapping their clocks on the concrete chess tables as they did everyday. He decided to walk around the park a little before heading to the train, just to see if anyone else was panicked about the riots or knew where they were actually happening. At the fountain in the center of the park, everything seemed the same as usual. People sat on the curb of the fountain and ate slices of pizza, falafels and sandwiches, and skate boarders zoomed past, north to the Washington Square arch, and he heard shady young men whispering, weed, weed, trying to sell plastic packets of oregano to clueless NYU students.
But then there was a heavy thudding and the down draft wind of a police helicopter that seemed to be flying so low that it barely cleared the tree tops of the park’s old oaks, maples and sycamores, and the people in the park began to scatter, quickly wrapping their lunches, stuffing them into brown bags. A half dozen very young policemen, still in cadet uniforms, ran in a phalanx from Washington Square South to Fifth Avenue with the urgency of soldiers going into battle. If they’ve mobilized the cadets this can’t be good, Paul thought, and he decided he’d better start heading to the subway.
Sixth Avenue seemed neither more busy nor less busy than usual at this time of day, but busy in a different way. Usually, it would be full of people having lunch or window shopping, the small perpetual crowd watching the perpetual basketball game at the caged court on Third Street, students drifting in and out of the bookstores, or getting coffee at any of the cafes. There were just about the same number of people, but they looked rushed and determined. People who looked like office workers, university faculty and administrators, who usually would not be seen until five or six o’clock or later were streaming out of buildings and down into the subway entrance, and they had the distracted look of people who were on the verge of panic but didn’t want to show it. He had better get out of Manhattan like the rest of them.
But there was something in him, something perverse, that wanted to see the thing played out. He wanted to catch a glimpse of the riots. Also, his stomach was sour and growling; he hadn’t eaten breakfast because Annie hadn’t gotten out of bed with him as she usually did – she hadn’t gotten up out of bed at a reasonably early time for weeks – and they hadn’t cooked or eaten anything together that morning, and with the auditions and rehearsals cancelled, the theater closed and the riots, he had forgotten to get anything for lunch. Maybe a bite before getting on the A, he thought.
He went to the Washington Square Diner, just a half block from the entrance to the subway, but as he grasped the glass front door, a young waitress grabbed the handle on the other side of the door, and shook her finger at him as though to say, oh, no you don’t.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice muffled through the glass, “we’re closing early.”
“Oh, come on, you’ve got to be kidding me. You guys are always open.”
“From what I’ve heard from the owners, there’s a mob marching down Sixth Avenue from Chelsea,” she said loudly and slowly through the glass as though she were trying to talk from under water, “they’ve already torched Penn Station, and they looted Barnes and Nobles on Seventh Avenue.”
“I’m very impressed,” Paul shouted through the glass, “mobs that loot book stores! Maybe they’re angry graduate students!”
The waitress was not impressed with his joke, and she locked the glass door and stood guard, so that the customers in the half full booths could leave, but no one could come in.
He walked a block north on Sixth Avenue to Gray’s Papaya hot dog stand, but before he could get inside, they were closing the doors and clanging down the steel shutters over the windows. The countermen were rushing the customers outside onto the street, to eat their hot dogs while walking. He’d just have to wait to eat until he got home.
He descended into the Washington Square station and, remembering what Annie had said about getting out of Manhattan and into Brooklyn as quickly as possible and by any means necessary, he decided that the fastest, most efficient thing to do was to wait on the mezzanine, where he could see the A train pulling into the station on the platform above him and the F train pulling into the platform below, so he could take whichever came first. Although it was only one o’clock, it was like rush hour. The platforms above him and below him filled quickly, not with
the mid day traffic of students and messengers, but with people carrying briefcases headed for home in the middle of the day.
He went to lean against the staircase railing, and noticed on the wall at the foot of the stair case a strange looking light bulb in a little metal cage sticking out of the wall of the mezzanine, and below the light was a sign that said, When Light is Flashing Robbery In Progress on Main Platform. He couldn’t parse what the sign was supposed to mean, and read it several times over. Who was it intended for? Did the transit police stand around on the mezzanine waiting for the sign to flash? If this was some sort of signaling system between the token clerk’s booth and the police, why didn’t it just signal to one of their offices? Why did it signal to the public mezzanine? Was it intended for the general public, a sort of warning that when the sign is flashing you should take the F on the lower platform and steer clear of the upper platform? He thought it was the dumbest sign he had seen in a subway system full of dumb signs, garbled announcements and inexplicable delays. He imagined a subway bureaucrat toiling away to come up with this system and chuckled to himself, at the image of this genius’s eureka moment – but then he thought it wasn’t so funny after all. He thought it demonstrated something about the city’s condition – some sort of failure, an abdication perhaps, like we can’t stop robberies, but we can light up this light bulb when they happen. He imagined the light not just lighting up, late at night once or twice a month as some desperate crack head or another tried to rob the token booth, but flashing with the rhythm of the crime and disorder occurring across the city. He imagined an array of lights to signal the city’s intractable mayem.
When Light is Flashing Brooklyn Yuf are Rioting Across West Village.
When Light is Flashing, Watermain Has Burst on Important Commercial Street.
When Light is Flashing, Howard Beach Guidos Are Hunting Random Black Man With Baseball Bats.
When Light is Flashing, Jamaican Crack Posse Opening Fire with Israeli Made Uzis on Bronx Street Corner.
When Light is Flashing, Ghost Shadow Tong Has Taken Over Another Street in Chinatown.
When Light is Flashing, Raul Velez of Canarsie Demonstrating on Jesus Colon Why He is Known as Being ‘Quick with the Knife.’
When Light is Flashing, Bear Stearns Trader Is Trading Against Client’s Accounts Using Insider Information.
When Light is Flashing, O’Hanlon’s Bar and Grill Emptying Tip Jar To Send to Provisional IRA.
He thought about some of the more extreme recent crime stories in the sensational press rags in recent years that despite his best efforts, he could not help reading when the headline was particularly bizarre or salacious. Cannibal of Thompkins Square Park dismembers girlfriend, cooks and serves girlfriend soup to park homeless. Killer Cupid shoots East New York prostitute through heart with crossbow. Severed hand found on Path Train.
When the F train pulled into the lower platform, he sprinted down the stairs and into the cool air conditioned car just before the doors closed. The train was packed and he had to stand.
The train only went three stops, to Delancy Street and then waited in the station for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes. The conductor blandly announced every few minutes that they we’re being held in the station without saying why or for how long. Passengers drifted off the train and onto the platform craning their necks down the tracks as though they could possibly see what was keeping the train from moving. People began to talk, as New Yorkers do during emergencies and unusual occurrences and unexpected delays, like blizzards, fires and water main breaks – not directly to each other, but obliquely. A woman in a power suit and sneakers laced over stockings and gym socks, standing next to Paul on the platform, began talking, while staring straight ahead, through the stalled train, across the tracks, to the uptown side of the station, not making eye contact with Paul even though he knew she meant her words for him.
“I’m sure it’s the riots keeping the trains from moving,” she said.
A man who looked like a Wall Street type, with his dark suit, bright yellow tie and collar pin, also not looking at Paul or at the woman said, “What I heard is youths from Brooklyn went into the tunnels between the boroughs and set track fires to stop the trains from running.”
“A friend of mine told me to be careful getting on the train because they put scrap metal on the tracks to derail the trains,” a very young man with a messenger bag said. “I bet you there’s a derailed train up ahead.”
When he realized that the train wasn’t coming, Paul sacrificed his token and went up to Delancy Street. Everything looked normal – there were no rioters – but most of the shops were closed. He walked south on Broadway until he reached City Hall, marveling at the office workers pouring out of the cast iron buildings and office towers. He turned left on Park Row, next to City Hall where he had expected to have to push his way through demonstrators who weren’t there, and headed over the foot path of the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a steady stream of people walking to Brooklyn and it reminded him of the last transit strike when thousands of people used the bridge to walk to Manhattan to work and back home to Brooklyn. At the center high point of the bridge, he turned back and looked for columns of smoke from mid town where Penn Station and Grand Central were, and searched the facade of the World Trade Center for broken windows, but there was nothing unusual. At the base of the Brooklyn side of the bridge he walked south toward Fulton Street. Near the state and federal court buildings, he watched a small, tightly packed herd of lawyers skittering across Tillary Street, their eyes as darting and vigilant as the eyes of startled deer, and one particularly scared attorney clutched his briefcase with both hands, by the handle with his right hand, cradling the bottom with his left hand, holding it tight against his chest. He could have tried to get a train at Jay Street, but he decided to walk east on Fulton Street to see the damage to A&S, but the metal shutters had already been pulled down over the main entrance on the Fulton Mall. He ducked around a side street to the large rear entrance of the department store, but once again he found only metal shutters drawn over the glass doors, and no sign of merchandise looted and thrown into the street, no smashed window glass, and no bitter burned smell of fire. He rushed into the Hoyt and Schermerhorn subway station and within a minute or so a C train pulled into the crowded station. He was at his home station, Layfeyette, within five minutes.
As he walked up South Oxford Street to his apartment, he searched for clues in the faces of the people of his neighborhood who were also streaming home from work early, but they seemed blank and intent to getting home. He looked west, over the roofs of the brownstones and apartment buildings of his neighborhood, toward the river and the bridges, scanning the horizon for rising smoke, but saw nothing. He pitched his hearing toward downtown, wondering whether he could detect the roar of some unruly crowd, but there were only the typical sounds of a spring day, the rustle of the ancient trees, newly leafed out, the far off sound of a car horn angrily protesting some traffic impoliteness, the voices of some giggling, running children across the street carrying to him, sounding like a burbling country stream.
When he reached his brownstone apartment building, he saw that a pack of neighborhood boys had taken over the stoop and he only recognized one of them, one of the oldest children in the building, a high schooler named Khaleed who lived with his single mother on the floor below him. Some of the boys had sullenly commandeered the wide cast iron bannisters of the limestone stairway as seats and as a sort of pedestal for an enormous boom box radio, which was playing a rap song of the new discordant, angry style that was being imported into New York from LA. It was so different from the rap music which he remembered from when he was younger and when he actually followed the genre, which had been full of clever word play and rhyming. The only words he could make out over the bass, drums and layers of voices and scratchy special affects was someone screaming, So don’t follow me up and down your market, or your little chop suey ass will be a target. That song – could you really call it a song? – ended before Paul got to the steps, and the radio station DJ immediately layered in another one that he didn’t recognize at all, but was so slow and lazy that the rapper seemed to be slurring his way through some sort of torpor. It didn’t sample any earlier soul music and under the rappers voice was just the repetitive beat of some sort of electronic device. The boys on the stoop all hung their heads down and swayed to the unintelligible grumbling, and it seemed that this new style, however incendiary its lyrics, rather than inciting anyone, just slowed these young men down, glazed their eyes, and immobilized them except for one or two alternating gestures, right shoulder and curved arms swung forward, then left, then right again, which seemed to be from another universe compared to the frantic break dancing that rap had inspired when he listened to it just a few years ago. It was as though the entire repertoire of expressions, emotions, and gestures he knew from black theater and performance and street culture was being edited down, distilled, and devolved, into one or two slack jawed postures. It’s ill yo, it’s dope. He wanted the play that he and Daryl and Annie were creating to reflect up to the minute street culture, but he barely had the heart to listen to the rap coming out of the radio these days. He couldn’t grasp its meanings, its attitudes, its vibrations, and he wondered whether it was just that he was getting old.
“Mr. Paul!” Khaleed shouted as he mounted the stairs and squeezed his way between the boys, “did you hear what happened in the city...”
“Not right now, Khaleed, I’ll talk to you later,” Paul said. He bounded up the stairs to his fourth floor walk up, and not wanting to startle Annie, he knocked on the door as he took out his keys.
“Who is it?” he heard Annie shout from the other side of the door.
“Why are you yelling?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Thank God you’re finally home,” she said, “Thank God you made it! I heard the trains weren’t running, and I thought you weren’t going to be able to get home until late, and that rat bastard across the hall has been harassing me, he’s been knocking on the door, and by the time I get down the hall to look out the peep hole, he runs away.”
“You want me to go kick Brandon’s ass for you, baby” he asked, “for knocking on our door?”
“Don’t make fun of me. I know it’s him. I can hear his footsteps running away from the door, that little rat-tat-tat his shoes make when he’s running away from the door – that’s why I know it’s him, because – have you ever noticed he has these tiny little feet for a man? And he wears these tiny shiny little shoes, and when he walks down the hall he makes that little tit-tat-tit-tat noise, and they used to say back home, men with little feet are sneaky and they’re thieves, and they have little feet so they can sneak around without making noise, but he wears those hard little leather Wall Street shoes so he can’t sneak around without making that sound and being heard, and he can’t run down the hall and get away with it ...”
Whenever she started quoting the wisdom of back home in the islands, he knew that he was in for some sort of incomprehensible superstition or warped metaphors that often really annoyed him; it meant she was slipping into a different mode of thinking – like how you can’t stir rice with a spoon, but only with a fork, or if someone sweeps the floor while you visit they secretly are telling you to go home – a mode of thinking that he couldn’t participate in, like he could in their usual real world discussion.
“OK, I’ll go talk to him. For all we know, he was scared and just wanted a friendly native to talk to.”
“Bullshit! He wants us out of here, and this is just the sort of event these people use to get us out and gentrify the neighborhood.”
“Well, it’s not Brandon’s decision, is it? And I doubt Mrs. Adams is going to evict us because the only white boy in her building is tap dancing down the hallway.”
“Don’t make fun of me. I don’t trust him anymore. He’s up to something, maybe with his Wall Street buddies, like maybe they’ll get together and buy the building from Mrs. Adams right out from under us, like that white bitch down the block ...”
“Since when are you all black nationalist? White bitch, white boy – you used to like Brandon. Let’s just slow down a minute, OK? I just got here, and I had to walk over the bridge, and I’m exhausted. And sweaty. What are they saying on TV about the riot?”
“I haven’t watched TV. I couldn’t stand the way they kept playing that one clip of the white guy getting bashed in the head with the brick – as though he’s the only person who’s getting hurt in this. I can’t stand the way they’re representing us, and the TV was just driving me crazy. I fucking hate TV. It’s like the more you watch it, the stupider you get.”
“OK but can I just sit and relax for a minute and check the news before I go and kick some Brandon ass for you?”
This was all getting a little too weird. It wasn’t that rare for Annie to work herself up like this into one of her states, but Brandon didn’t seem to be anything like the person Annie suddenly seemed to believe he was. From their stoop conversations, and the occasional neighborly dinner or beer, he knew Brandon was some sort of Wall Streeter, but from what he gathered, Brandon had decided to live in Fort Greet to maintain some last bit of Bohemian creds while his firm molded, massaged, and shaped him into a cog of finance, the kind of guy who would probably eventually look back on his Brooklyn days with embarrassed nostalgia. Paul had resisted Brandon’s somewhat awkward overtures to make him his cool black friend, his artsy buddy he could introduce his other friends to – to show he was not completely like them. But Brandon wasn’t a bad guy, really. At least he was trying and he had pretty good taste in music.
He found the remote on the couch, clicked on the TV and he and Annie stood watching as the remote began skimming past the usual mid afternoon fare of soap operas, game shows, and the freakish exhibitionist arenas that for some reason were still called talk shows, until he came upon the familiar face of the early evening anchor of one of the main local stations. The plump woman, who wore a bouffant hair style and whose broad face was the color of carob ice cream, was smiling serenely into the camera and was saying, “Once again, the top story of our special news bulletin is that nothing is happening. Let me repeat, nothing is happening. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers left work early today on rumors that the riots in Los Angeles and several other western and mid western cities had spread to New York, but we have an official statement from the mayor’s office and the police commissioner that these rumors are false, and that there are no riots in New York. Once again, there are no riots in New York.”
Paul and Annie backed away from the TV and slowly sat down in unison, holding hands over the remote, incredulous, like two people who had just heard that there was a death in the family. Annie wrestled the remote from Paul’s hand and began clicking through the local stations for more news bulletins, and a succession of screen sized heads and faces followed the serenely smiling mocha colored news anchor.
She found another local station broadcasting a special bulletin, but it was a national station, and was not reporting about what was or wasn’t going on in New York. The face of the man who was at the center of all this appeared in a video clip that played in a small split screen corner against a larger video clip of a group of people of all different colors, shapes and sizes, but almost all dressed in extremely baggy t-shirts and shorts and sneakers, running in and out of the broken plate glass window of what looked like a Los Angeles appliance store. In the small screen, the man looked all at the same time, scared, cowed, pleading and hopeful, and he was saying, over and over, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?”
Annie clicked again and the man and the looters disappeared, and the serene news anchor was starting over with her special mid day broadcast saying, “And once again, the big story of the day is that there are no riots in New York. Once again, there are no riots...” Annie clicked again and the next face on the television was the mayor, a man who looked like a computer generated morphing of the faces of every elderly grandfather in Fort Green and Bed Stuy, and he was being interviewed on a different local station by a different local anchor, who was also smiling serenely.
“Commissioner Ray Kelly informs me that there has not been a single incidence of personal violence anywhere in the city – except for a broken window or two in lower Manhattan,” he said smugly and self-congratulatory. “At times like this, one ought to keep in mind that our gorgeous mosaic of a city is not like Los Angeles. Since the beginning of the disturbances in LA, our office has been reaching out to the youth, the communities, the police precincts and ... You know, our young people have in the past chanted, ‘no justice, no peace,’ and while I deplore the threat inherent in that slogan, I think it’s fair to say that thanks to the community policing policy instituted by Commissioner Kelly and I, and our safe streets-safe city programs, many of our young people now have a sense of hope for justice and therefore ...”
The mayor had a way of addressing the city that made it seem as though, even when he was expressing the right sentiment, after a few sentences, Paul began hearing something like, blah, blah, blah, or the kind of bland, soothing language psychiatric social workers use on their more excitable patients. Annie clicked the TV remote and the mayor’s face disappeared.
The next talking head was large, pink-white, and completely bald, except for enormous, extremely bushy eyebrows, and at first, this face was very difficult to understand. It was as though Annie had clicked onto a foreign language cable station, but then the camera cut to the face of yet another familiar local news station anchorman.
“We’ve been talking with Professor Hendrik Van Enselen – uh, I see here, visiting professor of Social Psychology at Columbia University, all the way from the – Sor-bun-uni-versity – that’s in France.”
“No, no, no – I vas just also visiting professor at the Sorbonne before I came here for this semester, and I’m professor at ...”
“Thank you so much for that interesting explanation of how quickly rumors can spread, but could you tell us a little more about why you think they had such an effect – emptying out the city in a matter of hours? If it’s true that the rumor was started by a few store clerks in a Madison Avenue clothing shop who were hoping to get off work early, and as you said by calling their friends, and their friends calling their friends, the rumor could spread – what did you call it,” the anchor man looked down at his notes – “ex-po-nen-chall-ee...”
“No, no, no, you zee dat ees not de interestingk qvestion. It ees not an interestingk qvestion vhy some bored shop-girls vould lie in order to on a beautiful Spring Friday afternoon go home to zee perhaps dere boy-friends or go perhaps to go to ze cinema,” the man said. He waved his hands excitedly while he talked but his broad pink face and bald head were immobile, except for his extremely bushy eyebrows that rhythmically arched with each of his exclamations, like inch worms crawling across his forehead.
“Ze interestingk qvestion ees vhy a city of several millions of people, zuppozedly zophisticated people, should believe her, eef in vact, zis rumor of ze shop-girls is true of how zis rumor of ze riots came to be started. And another interestingk qvestion is vhy dere should be zis same rumor or zimilar rumors starting not once but several times in several places. And zat is from ze European perspecteef ze interestingk qvestion – vhy vhen someone says, ze blacks are rioting here or ze blacks are rioting dere, and you can zee vit your own eyes dere is no rioting here and dere is no rioting dere, yet you all run home...”
“Well that’s very interesting Doctor – I mean Professor – Van Enselen. We’ll have to leave it there. Next up, sports on the ...”
“This is bullshit,” Annie said. “I know they’re just lying to us. I know what I heard, and this is the biggest fucking coverup ...”
Annie clicked the remote again and the European social psychologist and his host disappeared. She seemed to be looking for trouble.
She leaned forward on the couch, rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and stared intently at the special news broadcasts about there being no news, that nothing was happening, clicking from station to station, as though searching for someone to slip up and blurt out the real story. She bit the pinky fingernail of her right hand. She looked as though she eagerly wanted something, not nothing, to be happening in New York, like she wanted there to be riots on DeKalb Avenue, wanted feral youth to be looting A&S on Fulton Street, wanted Grand Central Station to be blazing, on fire, and the Brooklyn Museum to be being bum rushed by wild crowds. He imagined that she wanted the news of the great psychic hoax of 1992 to be a double hoax – that the news that there was nothing, the fake street news and gossip of riots, was itself fake; that the news that nothing was happening was wrong, that there was something rather than nothing, even if that something was terrible.
Paul felt a wave of disappointment in her – not just one heavy wave weighing down on his slumping shoulders, as he watched his wife watch television, but burdening, disappointing wave after burdening, disappointing wave, pressing him down. He imagined other young couples all over Brooklyn watching these same television bulletins, and then pictured one imaginary, idealized couple about their age, who looked like them, both of them having arrived home early from work, turning on the TV, greeting the news of nothing, at first with incredulity, then relief, and then laughter; perhaps opening a bottle of wine together; perhaps deciding to treasure this beautiful, sunny, warm, spring, early weekend, bonus Friday afternoon – this peaceful afternoon – by sipping wine on the fire escape, or taking a walk in Fort Green Park, or having an early dinner at a sidewalk restaurant in Park Slope.
But not this wife. No. That wasn’t going to happen here. He was envious of the imaginary couple that he had conjured.
No, she was going to bring into their apartment all the terrible events that weren’t going on in the city. If it wasn’t there, she’d make it here. Maybe that was a good thing – for her. It helped her in her roles. She was like a fine, tight, string on an instrument – maybe like a steel string on Stanley Clarke’s electric bass – and when the sidewalk pavement throbbed with sub-sonic vibrations that no one else could quite hear clearly, she picked them up, and emitted sympathetic harmonic tones. She wasn’t crazy. This is what she was doing today – emitting sympathetic harmonics to the vibrations of the city. She was like one of those animals that pick up vibrations in the earth through its paws and then skitters away into the forest. Fine for picking up the vibrations needed for her role in the play. Not fine for enjoying a bonus spring afternoon in a Park Slope restaurant.
He sat next to her staring at her staring at the TV, and wondered whether she had any idea how he felt about her right now. But even if she could have read his mind, what could she know? Because he wasn’t sure how he felt about her. If she could read his mind, what she would get would be a jumble of feelings – disappointment, concern, tenderness, hope that she’ll snap out of it – the kind of love you feel after fifteen years, which often doesn’t feel like love at all, but is an accretion of experiences, memories, arguments, ecstasies, irreconcilable incompatibilities, and collaborations.
He couldn’t watch her or listen to her in this state or watch the news and felt he had to step outside. At times like then when he needed some distance, but not city blocks of it, he went up the top floor stairway to the roof, propped open the shed door and sat on the low wall between his building and the one next door. She didn’t notice as he left the couch and slipped out the apartment door.
From the roof, he looked out over the neighborhood and beyond to downtown Brooklyn, the bridges, lower Manhattan and the East Side. Even though the TV talking heads had told him there were no riots, he scanned the horizon for rising smoke, for fires leaping from the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers, for mobs surging across the footpaths, roadways and subway tracks of the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. There was nothing – nothing was happening. Really, how much worse was Annie for anticipating something happening than he was? He had tarried and detoured in the Village, and on lower Broadway, rubber necking, looking for disaster, wanting to see anything that might be occurring if it were occurring. Now he was scanning the entire city, looking for where the trouble was. It wasn’t too late. Riots don’t necessarily start early in the day and on time. There was still time.
Or maybe he wanted to be able to see what other people saw or thought they saw. He wanted to be able to participate in the great unseen mental landscape. He wanted to be able to pick up the cosmic vibrations they picked up – that Annie was always so good at picking up – of action, of drama in the streets that, even if only imaginary, could shut down the city. He wanted to be able to see the mobs of rampaging black yuf burning down A&S that others saw – these mobs that, although imaginary, were more real than the black youths who he could see on the street below, on the stoop, listening to rap music from LA. The imaginary black yuf had shut down the city – everyone saw them, it seemed, except him – but the real black youths on his stoop were insignificant, irrelevant, as inconsequential to the functioning of the vast city, to the way it actually worked, as leprechauns or fairies. Just measured by what they could accomplish – shutting down the great engine of New York City, A&S, Bloomingdale’s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his little theater, subways, NYU – the rampaging black yuf of terrified imaginations were vastly more powerful than the actual, real kids on the stoop, and in their power, they rivaled Wall Street, the mayor’s office, the NYPD, and the National Guard. Who else could have shut down the city within a few hours?
The heat rising from the blacktop roof began to exhaust him and he realized how sweaty and dusty he was from the long walk home and from sitting on the filthy roof ledge. He slipped back into the apartment and from the hallway, watched Annie who was still flipping from channel to channel.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he called down to the living room. She semi-nodded, but he wasn’t sure she understood what he had said.
In the shower, he let the lukewarm water pour over his dreadlocks, and down his back for a long time, until he heard Annie knocking on the door and shout over the drone of the water, “Can you please hurry up? I need to use the bathroom!”
“I’ll be out as soon as I can,” he shouted, but he knew that he was not really going to rush because this was just one more of her minor quirks that had escalated in recent weeks from the merely eccentric to the truly annoying. In the evenings, she would spend hours and hours locked in the bathroom, taking long showers, and then, even when the shower was over, doing God knows what. That, though, wasn’t the worst part. It was that during these spells, she had a possessiveness over the bathroom that seemed obsessive. It wasn’t so much a problem of how much time she spent in it, but that she resented any time he spent in it – that his taking a shower at an unusual time, say in the middle of the day like today, made her want to force him to surrender the territory so she could take up residence in it for additional hours and hours and hours. He felt that she liked to knock on the door like this, not because she really needed it but because his using it cut off an escape route that she seemed always to need. It was unreasonable and he resolved not to give in. He would take longer if need be, without saying so.
After a few minutes, Annie’s semi-polite knocking was replaced, and she was pounding on the door.
“I need to get in the bathroom, right now,” she shouted through the door.
He stepped out of the shower and decided to towel off and put his clothes on in the bathroom, rather than surrender.
“Listen,” she shouted, “you don’t realize I need to be in there right now.”
Paul slowed down as he put on his socks and shoes. He tried to make a perfect bow knot in his shoe laces. The knocking and demands subsided. Maybe she got the hint.
When he finally came out of the bathroom, Annie was standing by the door, glowering at him.
“See what you made me do!” she screamed, handing him the kitchen bucket.
Had he made her wash the kitchen floor, he wondered. Then he smelled the pungent odor of urine and saw that the white bucket had in the bottom yellow liquid.
“You didn’t really, did you – that’s disgusting,” he said.
“You made me do it,” she said.
“Did you take your medication?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me that. It’s none of your business.”
“Honey, of course it’s my business. Don’t be like that. You haven’t been taking your medication, have you?”
“None of your business.”
“Did you take your medication?”
“No. I didn’t take my fucking medication,” she said.
“You mean you didn’t take it today? Did you take it yesterday?”
“I’m not taking that shit anymore. It makes me stupid and dull. How do you think I’m supposed to research my role if I’m taking that garbage? How do you think I’m supposed to get into role?”
She seemed to be looking past him or through him at some point maybe ten or twenty yards behind him. Her head bobbled wearily, like one of those baseball figure toys you see in the backs of the car in front of you, when you’re stuck in traffic. For the first time today, he noticed that her eyes were puffy, as though she had been crying a long, long time before he came home.
“How long has it been since you took your medication?” he said, not really asking, “You didn’t take it today or yesterday, did you? You haven’t taken it for a week? Two weeks, maybe? Have you?”
“Don’t ask me how long it’s been since I took my medication. Just be grateful I’m not taking that shit. I’m getting back to my old self. I’m doing research. I’m doing shit. I’m getting into role.”
He had to convince himself that his wife was not crazy. He had to remember all the conversations that the two of them had had with Dr. Edwards, about how there is no such thing as crazy. There are imbalances in chemicals in the brain, and there are medications that can rebalance those imbalances and the person becomes normal again.
She seemed to gather strength and confidence for a moment and her head stopped bobbling.
“I haven’t taken that shit for a week, maybe two weeks, and you know what? I’m getting smarter. I’m getting back to my old self. I’m able to see things again – how things really are. I’m seeing things much more clearly now.”
“Honey, you’re not seeing anything. You need to take your medication,” he said moving close to her, trying to be friendly, taking her arm in his.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, pulling her arm away, “I know what you’re trying to do. You and your faggot friend. The two of you don’t want me to do the research to give a great performance. Oh, poor Annie! She needs our help! Oh poor stupid Annie, she needs us to write some shit for her, to direct her, because she can’t do another breakthrough performance – she can’t be allowed to have another breakthrough performance.”
He had to remind himself again that she wasn’t crazy. The particular organic brain malfunction, the particular imbalance of chemicals in her brain had nothing to do with her being a bad person. He would have to help her, get her to take her medication, and she’d be her old self. This behavior wasn’t her. The mean things she was saying had nothing to do with how she really felt about him, how she felt when she was normal. This was the new thing. It had nothing to do with childhood experiences or her relationship with her mother or father. In fact, latest research shows that Freud was wrong and childhood experience has northing to do with it. So her behavior – no her symptoms today – have nothing to do with the story she told him when they were first dating other about how, back in Jamaica, when she was a little girl, she watched her father sauntering home, liming as they say in the West Indies, smiling and waving at his little girl, when out of the blue he was run down by a bus. Things like that do not make you crazy. In fact, there is no such thing as crazy. There are only chemical imbalances. It had nothing to do with being left with an aunt who didn’t care very much for her while her mother came to Brooklyn to look for work. For two years. When she was only six or eight. It had nothing to do with finally getting here and living with her mother who was under the thumb of that weird landlady who took their passports and told the mother where and when to work, or the flight in the middle of the night from Crown Heights to Bed Stuy. Everyone has had tough times, but not everyone gets in these states. It’s not a moral failing of course – even if any of these behaviors were based on what had happened, of course it would not be a moral failing, because these were pretty extreme things to happen. He did not have anything to do with this series of – what should we call them now that there was no such thing as a nervous breakdown?
“You’re writing these happy crap songs about homeless people living under the FDR Drive and crack heads in Brower Park, and you won’t even go near the homeless camp under the FDR or walk through Brower Park,” she said, “How the fuck do you think you’re going to be able to write about them without actually going there and doing research, like I do? How do you think you’re supposed to write about crack heads smoking crack in Brower Park without...”
“I don’t think I need to smoke crack with crackheads who are smoking crack in Brower Park to write a sad song about crack heads smoking crack,” he said.
“You’re not the director you used to be,” she said.
“Well, that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think? And when was the last time you saw Dr. Edwards? He called me at the theater yesterday and said you missed your Tuesday appointment.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“You know, when you just don’t show up, we have to pay for the appointment anyway, right? You know we don’t have that kind of money, right?”
“I was doing research. Stop trying to micro-manage my research and my doctor’s appointments. I’ll pay for the missed appointment.”
“With what?” he asked.
“I don’t want to see Dr. Edwards because he’s going to try to force me to start taking that shit again.”
He wondered how to get her to go to the hospital and see Dr. Edwards.
“You can’t keep skipping your appointments with Dr. Edwards like that,” he said.
“I don’t want to see Dr. Edwards.”
“But you like Dr. Edwards. You used to like Dr. Edwards. Forget about the medication – wouldn’t you like to talk to Dr. Edwards?”
“I used to like to talk to Dr. Edwards,” she said.
“When you were watching TV, I called him, and told him about what you went through today. I told him about how Brandon was harassing you, and he said that that kind of thing is a stresser, and that you should come in and talk to him about it – talk about how we could all come up with strategies to get Brandon to stop harassing you when you’re home alone.”
“You believed me when I said Brandon was harassing me? Dr. Edwards believes me?”
“Of course I believe you. Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
“You acted like you didn’t believe me before.”
“There’s a difference between being skeptical of something that’s hard to believe that you’re telling me and not believing you. I thought about it, and now I believe you. And Dr. Edwards believes you, and he wants to talk to you.”
“I wouldn’t mind talking to Dr. Edwards, but I’m not going to start taking medication again.”
“He says it’s not that you’re not taking your medication, but that you’re under a lot of stress. He says you just need to talk to him to relieve the stress.”
“I used to like to talk to Dr. Edwards sometimes,” she said.
“So, OK, let’s go see Dr. Edwards. I promise you, you won’t have to take any medication if you don’t want to. You can talk to him about how you’re being harassed. I think you’ll feel much better if you talk to him about it.”
“I need to talk to someone who’ll believe me.”
“I’ll call a cab. Of course, he’s not having office hours in his private office right now. He’s doing rounds at the hospital, so we’ll meet him at Methodist. And all those things you said before – you were in role, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those things you said, like about Daryl – you were in role; you were doing research, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know,” she said.
“I mean you were saying things you had picked up doing research, right? They were things that people – like people in Bay Ridge would say, right? You were doing research in Bay Ridge, right?” he said.
“I wasn’t in Bay Ridge. I was in Park Slope and Crown Heights,” she said.
“Well, maybe not today, but you did research in Bay Ridge, or maybe it was Bensonhurst. Maybe last week or the week before.”
“I don’t remember right now. Maybe I did pick them up somewhere.”
“That’s right. You were in role,” he said, “You were doing research.”
“I didn’t mean them, I guess, some of the things I said, if that’s what you mean.”
“Right. You didn’t mean them, right?”
“I guess not.”
“Daryl said just today, you know, he adores you. He just wants you to get back to rehearsals – when you’re feeling better.”
“Tell Daryl I love him and I’ll try to be back in rehearsal soon.”
#
After they heard the livery cab blowing its horn in the street, they left the apartment, and she seemed to relax enough to let him take her arm. In the hallway, as they passed the door to Brandon’s apartment, she leaned her head to the side, onto his shoulder.
“I think maybe Brandon wasn’t knocking on the door. I didn’t see who it was, really. I’m just not so sure anymore,” she said.
Halfway down the staircase, she stumbled on a stair and blurted out, “Oopsie Daisy!” Paul caught his wife around her waist to hold her up. She was exhausted and slumping into him by the time they got to the foot of the staircase. The cab was waiting in the street just opposite the stoop where the boys were still standing around listening to the boom box radio, and it was still playing the new style of rap from LA.
“Mr. Paul,” Khaleed called out as they passed the group, “You heard? The whole city shut! White folks scared, yo!”
The other boys were doubled over laughing at Khaleed’s speech-making. Paul thought, I really need to spend more time talking to Khaleed, he’s not a bad kid.
“Mr. Paul!” Khaleed shouted after them as they walked past to the livery cab waiting at the curb, “I don’t know who crazier, New York or LA!”
“You right, Khaleed,” Paul said, although the boys couldn’t hear his low voice over the booming radio, “I don’t know who crazier either.”
Update: Thanks so much to the editors for placing this story in the Community Spotlight!